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Contextual advertising has been a big hit over the past half a decade or so, though I wonder whether it suffers from a kind of shotgun approach, whereby you can simply choose a bunch of keywords, pull a lever, and then put your feet on the desk.

Sure, this is typically better than blasting out your message without any concerns about targeting, but it’s almost too easy to reach the masses, and you can end up with egg on your face. Context isn’t always a positive thing.

As with all advertising, the creative elements of a campaign are meant to stand out for the right reasons, yet every year we see amusing new examples of contextual advertising that’s gone wrong in some way.

Here are 16 of the more ironic ad placements I’ve seen over the past year or so (most of which are contextual). They are often funny, ridiculous and horrendous all at the same time.

Perhaps we’ll see less of them in the years ahead as targeted advertising tools evolve, but for now we should understand the importance of choosing a few negative keywords when you programme your next campaign.

As one of the biggest real estate companies in the country, Coldwell Banker is in a tough spot when it comes to media. It has to drive leads for its brokers. It has to make consumers aware that it has the stability to get through a huge market downturn. Last week it announced a major online and offline media campaign aimed at doing both. In terms of spending it’s split down the middle and we talked to Senior Marketing Vice President Mike Fischer about its positioning.

Century 21, which is perhaps your biggest competitor, announced it was moving 100 percent of its spending online. Why not follow that?I believe in balance. There’s a cost for everything and I think in order for us to take care of our brokers and our consumers we need to make sure we have a balanced approach. We’ll probably spend 40 percent of our budget online. I think that’s a pretty good place to be.